We have, what looks to be another classic Sheffield Wednesday season, as The Owls have hit another obstruction whilst their rivals sit like kings, at the top of the table. Who’s to blame? Well, the owner, Dejphon Chansiri of course – who’s been creating these problems from the very beginning…
Dejphon Chansiri acquired Sheffield Wednesday back in 2014, sharing a vision with the fans that the football club will be back in the Premier League, come 2017, which would also be the clubs 150th anniversary. We almost got the confetti out, but the club came short to Huddersfield Town, who would go on to play Reading in final and take Premiership status for the first time in the clubs history, lengthening out Wednesday’s Premier League 17 year wait, on hold for another year again.
I’d be very surprised if anyone at the club has any ambition to get the club back up to the Premier League, if the players aren’t getting paid. Yes, once again the owner has cash flow problems. A club statement followed recently: “Sheffield Wednesday can confirm a temporary issue with the payment of player salaries for the month of March.”
Not paying your own staff, as these players are, is atrocious. Dejphon Chansiri is accountable, completely for these cash flow issues, with the Thai-business man’s overseas company having unpaid debts. The fact that fans of the club have to be associated with Chansiri, equates to the absolute troublesome mischief they have to be put through.
You take one of the most recent fan forums, where Dejphon Chansiri demanded that if the fans want him out, then they should find a new owner, themselves. He likes these conversations with the fans, as back in October 2023, he cried out for help to try and raise £2 million, to help pay-off club debts. I’m sure there’ll be another call out soon…
The owner tends to have more meetings with the EFL, than he does with the fans. Over a year after he was calling out for fans to raise some money for him – we saw the EFL place a transfer embargo, again for the amounts he owed to HM Revenue and Customs. In another statement from the club, it was declared as a “temporary issue”. At what point does a “temporary” issue turn into a permanent one, as that word is getting used a lot here…
Diving into his antics more, we saw them go down to League One in the 2020-21 season, a league they had the joys of avoiding for nine years previously. It was set off to fail from the very beginning, that season, with the club taking a 12-point disciplinary point deduction, due to the owner involving the sale of the Hillsborough Stadium as part of the 2017-18 sales. It seems perfectly fine? Nope, the so-called football owner, gave over false information as the sale was made a year before this. Garry Monk was in hell’s chance to keep them up, and was sacked three months into the season that year.
It’s never been a perfect relationship between manager and owner, with Dejphon Chansiri in the picture. You had the bizarre news breaking out that Darren Moore who’d done what should’ve been an unnecessary task of bringing them up from League One to the Championship, would be leaving the club less than two months before that big return to the Championship would be underway. Conflict striked between the reasoning why. Many were to believe Chansiri’s words that Moore wanted a pay increase, which was something he couldn’t support.
If you spoke to the former manager, he’d tell you differently – it was never about a salary increase, he just felt the timing wasn’t right with the club’s ambitions, speaking with Sky Sports: “When we had the meeting, the vision set at that timescale was just a little bit out of line.” If you read between the lines, it may suggest that Chansiri doesn’t have the financial means to grace Darren Moore with, so he can perform a good movement up the table to claim the club Premiership status again, as he carried on to say in the interview that he believed he would have took them up to the Premier League and that’s where they deserve to be, too. That’s just speculation, one thing that Darren did openly tell Sky – he did not wish to have an increase in salary, whatsoever.
Xisco Muñoz was the man elected to take Moore’s team into the Championship. After 10 games, it was without a doubt the sensible decision to sack the Spaniard, who was winless.
What’s turned out to be an excellent appointment – Danny Röhl took over the club and has flirted with the play-offs this season. What hasn’t helped the German manager, is the players not getting paid. It’s left an extremely difficult final seven games left, for Danny and the rest of the squad to clinch a play-off position, sitting 5 points from 6th, but with five teams in between them. Winning England’s biggest prize-money to offer at Wembley in the Play-off Final, would be needed, but even if that does miraculously happen, where does the money go first? It should be for the players who need paying, but with constant debt issues with his company overseas that has led to him not having the finances to pay his staff, makes it seem unappealing going up in any shape or form whilst Chansiri is at the wheel.
Let’s go back to his relationship with the fans, being such an ugly one and getting uglier each season, the rise of ticket prices has been such an extraordinary amount. You’d think you were seeing them play Arsenal, Liverpool or Man United. Not Oxford, Plymouth or Stoke. It’s at this point where you wonder – are the fans simply there to cover his constant vicious circle of unpaid debts. Or are they going to see the owner re-invest any of this back into the club, to make promising signings that’ll see a return back to the Promise Land? Given the fact that the club were the 20th highest spenders in the league this season, I wouldn’t expect any signings to be of Chansiri’s interests, anytime soon.
Dejphon Chansiri has the keys to an iconic and historical English football club, yet you’d think those keys were little plastic ones that you normally give to a toddler because it makes a funny, jingling noise. It’s an immature owner who, sadly, Owl fans have to put up with on an annual basis now, with shameful trip-ups. Danny Röhl is here right now and doing well. It’s probably only a matter of time for a club to snatch-him up and to give him an actual promising job, instead of this circus house that Chansiri has accommodated him with. There’s currently a release clause reportedly worth £4 million on the German manager, who Leicester and Southampton have looked at activating in the past.
The fact that there’s a release clause in the first place – shows the lack of interest Chansiri has on keeping hold of a good manager. I guess it’s just another chance for him to make some money, which undoubtedly is something he’s lacking right now. Losing him would feel like a loss of hope for Wednesday fans. The efforts he’s done to transform, like I say a ‘circus house’ into a fine place to be at, is fantastic work from the 35-year old manager.
There’s reports of a US-consortium that wants to do what’s right for the club – provide them with financial backing and levitate them back to the Premier League. It’s down to Chansiri to give the fans what they all easily want and allow someone else to take over. Or, does the Thai-business man believe he can squeeze just that little bit of extra cash out from the club, before he even bothers to find the exit door.
I think from dotting the dots together, we all understand that these “temporary issues” of unpaid debts and not paying the players are clearly permanent ones. But, if you want to do some more easy investigative work here – the permanent issue at the club is clearly Dejphon Chansiri.
Give the fans what they want and put the club up for sale. It’s not even just me saying that, I’m simply echoing what the Supporters Trust have cried out for earlier this week: “If he doesn’t or can’t carry on funding the club in the way that’s needed … the window of opportunity to sell is now.”
At this point – it’s simply a business that he’s trying to bleed out. The city already knows the dominant colour, at the moment, is red. Sheffield Wednesday remain under their shadow, in the dark, and have no chance in getting out of it whilst Dejphon is here. He doesn’t even know where the torch is, by this point…
